Gender and rate effects on speech intelligibility

Abstract

Older adults seeking hearing help often complain of particular difficulty understanding female voices. This contrasts with studies using young listeners with normal hearing in which female talkers have been found to be generally more intelligible than male talkers (e.g., Bradlow et al., 1996). Could some factor in addition to talker gender be causing older adults to have increased difficulty understanding female voices? Speech that has been time-compressed has been shown to be less intelligible than unprocessed speech (e.g., Gordon-Salant and Friedman, 2011), but few data exist to show whether an increased presentation rate causes an equal loss of intelligibility for male and female talkers. The present study will explore whether an increased playback rate has a greater negative effect on the intelligibility of speech produced by female versus male talkers. Subjects will listen to sentences produced by two female and two male speakers from the Utah Speaking Style Corpus presented at either their original rate or at an increased rate (1.5 times faster) and type out what they heard. The resulting data will show whether, for young normal-hearing listeners, an increased rate of speech affects the intelligibility of female talkers more than it affects the intelligibility of male talkers.